Boston attacks may finally reveal global nature of radical Islam

A police officer reacts to news of the arrest of one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Friday, April 19, 2013, in Boston. Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured in Watertown, Mass. The 19-year-old college student wanted in the bombings was taken into custody Friday evening after a manhunt that left the city virtually paralyzed and his older brother and accomplice dead. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

LONDON — The most savage wars that I have witnessed were the Rwandan genocide and the two Chechen wars.

Much of the slaughter in Chechnya was murder at close quarters. The Chechens killed Russians with great exuberance. Lacking other means, they primarily used crude homemade bombs, booby traps, snipers and assault weapons. The Russian troops were often drunk, demoralized and badly led. They mostly fought back with cannon fire, heavy artillery and attack aircraft, which they used promiscuously and indiscriminately to kill civilians.

The FBI and CIA are obsessed right now with the riddle of why Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, ethnic Chechens whose historic enemy has been Russia, allegedly chose to attack last Monday’s Boston Marathon. As the young brothers spent many of their formative years in New England — whereas Republican immigration critics have scathingly noted their family had been granted asylum — there has already been some American self-flagellation over why it’s alleged, as U.S. President Barack Obama asked Friday, they did “resort to such violence?”

These doubts have been fed by the fact the brothers’ personal connection to Chechnya is tenuous. They never actually lived there so had no first-hand experience of the super-violence that reigned for years in that mountain redoubt during the 1990s.

However, as I learned during the Balkan Wars — where Croats, Serbs and Slavic Muslim elders incited their children and grandchildren to murder by constantly recalling atrocities often going back more than seven centuries to the Battle of Kosovo Polje — the Tsarnaevs did not need to have lived in Chechnya to have learned how to hate like Chechens. Their kin and community would have given them a thorough schooling in their community’s bloody history. They would also be aware that the Chechens fought back indirectly against central authority by ruthlessly dominating Russia’s underworld.

There may be no tougher, more ethnically diverse corner of the world than the North Caucasus. Since the time of the czars, the Russians have tried to impose their religious and political beliefs on a toxic brew of Ingush, Ossetians, Abkhazians, Balkars, Turks and Greeks. Each of these groups has a long list of grievances against Moscow including their notorious mass exile to Central Asia by Josef Stalin during the Second World War.

We have been discovering that the Tsarnaevs had a profound attachment to Chechnya and that Islam had become a big part of their lives in recent years. This was not always the case with Chechens. When I covered the First Chechen War, which broke out late in 1994, religion was not much of a motivating factor. By the time I came back at the onset of the Second Chechen War five years later, many Chechens had embraced a radical version of their faith. There were far more mosques and beards, some Chechen women had taken to covering themselves from head to toe in black robes and Shariah courts meted out a particularly brutal form of justice.

As the Russians increasingly got the upper hand in the Caucasus, Chechen fighters went on killing sprees in northern Russia, attacking soft targets such as the Moscow Metro. In their most audacious attack, about 40 Chechens took 700 Muscovites hostage at a theatre in 2002. All of the terrorists and at least 130 hostages died when Russian special forces released some kind of chemical agent.

Other Chechens later joined al-Qaida’s fight against the U.S.-lead coalition in Afghanistan. I remember being with Canadian troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan, who were shocked to intercept radio communications in Chechen and in Russian — the lingua franca of jihadis from there and former Soviet republics such as Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and where, as it turns out, the Tsarnaev boys spent their early years.

The latest Afghan war, which spawned radical Islamic groups on its borders, including parts of northwestern China, may prove to be the link that inspired and motivated the lethal attack at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15.

The Boston rampage triggered a massive security alert at Sunday’s London Marathon, but the show went on. In a wonderful show of defiance and solidarity with Boston, 36,000 runners and half a million spectators turned out to run and watch on a dazzlingly sunny spring day.

There may be darker days ahead for Washington. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been scorned for years for having demanded that the White House take the Chechen terrorist threat seriously. Kremlin warnings that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a terrorist, or at least a terrorist in the making, were seemingly not taken seriously enough.

What happened in Boston underlines again that radical Islam is a global brand with a global reach. It benefits from the cross-fertilization of movements in the Caucasus, the Hindu Kush, the Maghreb, the Sahara, the Saudi Peninsula, the Balkans, and reaches into the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagos. To contain it requires a unity of purpose that the rest of the world has not yet fully shown or comprehended.

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A police officer reacts to news of the arrest of one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Friday, April 19, 2013, in Boston. Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured in Watertown, Mass. The 19-year-old college student wanted in the bombings was taken into custody Friday evening after a manhunt that left the city virtually paralyzed and his older brother and accomplice dead. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

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